And the spirit fizzled like static to nothing. He disappeared.
“Jai, stop,” his eerie whispers continued, and I followed the sound down the path.
I didn’t know why, but this spirit needed me. The little boy was so strong, so ruthless, so determined, and I had to help.
My feet picked up when his cries did, and I turned frantic as the echoes faded. I reached the alleyway and bolted into the depths of the pitch-black, having no idea where he was leading me.
I ran and ran and ran, my feet numb and heels blistering, until my palms hit a chain-linked fence on the other side behind the shopping center. Under a single buzzing street light, Julian was standing in the middle of a basketball court with his bare back to me, his shoulders and muscles flexing, holding a girl by the throat in the air. A girl I didn’t recognize. She had short black hair, but not Ivy. Someone else.
“JAI, NO!” the spirit cried in my ear.
A scream ripped into the air and all around me. An earsplitting sonorous scream. Julian’s scream.
I tried fighting through it, and my fingers gripped the fence as I yanked back and forth. “Julian!”
He didn’t hear me. He didn’t even flinch. “Julian!”
Panicked, my gaze jerked for an opening. There was one at the far end. I moved quickly, passing a man who was sleeping against a dumpster, or dead. I didn’t have time to check.
“JULIAN!” I tried to scream over him. It was impossible. “STOP!”
The girl’s face was turning blue, and blood seeped from her ears as he held her high under the dim and humming light. He was locked in another world, a daze. With all my strength, I bulldozed into him, knocking Julian to the ground and the girl from his grasp.
Hours seemed short. Seconds seemed longer, but it hadn’t been hours that passed.
The girl coughed life back into her as she stumbled to her feet and took off across the basketball court. My head pounded, my face pressed against the cold concrete. I couldn’t hear anything. It was as if an atomic bomb had blasted inside my head. But Julian’s screaming had stopped. I knew that much.
I blinked, watching her half running, half screaming for help. Julian was lying beside me, his pant-leg grazing my bare one, his arm pressing against mine, looking up into the midnight sky as if he wanted to be a part of it. It was cold. It was wet. I was breathing. Julian was breathing. The girl he almost killed was breathing too, and running and alive. I closed my eyes and opened them again, unable to move from his side as if we’d become one.
There had to be a reason why I was being pulled to him, whether it was me, this ghost, or something else entirely. There had to be a reason why I hadn’t succumbed to my death from seeing his face as the rest. It all had to mean something …
The fog in my ears was slowly dying away. Julian’s chest expanded, and I noticed the sadness expel in a dull breath behind his mask. “What’s happening to me?” he croaked into the night, the light from the moon and stars touched over his outline. His form, his shape, his edges, his colors. Julian was dark and bright like a morbid black sun.
“I don’t know,” I told him, rolling onto my back and staring at the sky with him. The clouds crawled over the star-freckled canvas, ribbons of ink and eternity. “What do you remember?”
For a moment, Julian didn’t speak. The night didn’t speak either. It was as if the world had been turned upside down or we’d been transported somewhere else where no worry lived. Everything was calm.
“Nothing. I was lying in my bed. Now I’m lying here. Now I’m with you. And it’s nice. I don’t want to leave.”
I don’t want to leave either. “Does this happen a lot?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know anything anymore. It feels like something is controlling me … I have no will. I’m not me … I’m something else. Something dark. And Darkness doesn’t have fingers to twist into me or legs to chase after me. It doesn’t stalk me or prey on me. It can’t drag me under anything because Darkness is already here. Everywhere … All the time … It lives inside me. It’s all I am. I am Darkness.” His shoulder relaxed beside me. “And you’re still here. Why are you still here?”
Why am I still here? Had he meant in Weeping Hollow? At this basketball court? With him?
I didn’t have the answers. Even if I did, none of them would have made sense to anyone, but it all made sense in my heart. I was still here, lying beside the Hollow Heathen because it felt familiar and normal. If I weren’t here with him, the mere thought of that wouldn’t make sense to me.
So, I wrapped it all up in six words: “Because I want to be here.”
Julian released a breath. Everything he did was so loud and in my atmosphere no matter how far away he was. His breaths rattled like a drumline in my ears, and every flicker of his long black lashes was like notes bouncing off the cello. He was loud and filling me, dragging in heavy breaths and letting them go.
“Okay,” he told me. “Can we just lay like this for a while?”
A fist of his words wrapped around my heart, pumping a new beat inside my chest. My gaze followed the angles of his silhouette and his thick black hair and the hardness in his form as he lay beside me. He was all backward, wearing his soul like skin—and his soul was beautiful. Not beautiful like a rose but beautiful like a Black Velvet petunia.
Never in my life had I come across a more captivating man than him. His eyes generally held a madness. His muscles had a way of tensing, perhaps from burdens he may be carrying. But there were moments, moments such as these, when they beamed of nostalgia and wistfulness of equal proportion—a sweet blend of melancholy.
And Julian’s burdens must be deranged and disturbing considering the town and the curse, turning him into this nightmare who lurked in the shadows. But despite all these things, he was capable of such a glacial gentleness, and I wanted to wrap myself inside it and fall asleep in his chill.
I inched my hand toward him until my fingers touched his. I watched as his eyes closed for a moment before they opened again, probably trying to make sense of this strangeness that lived within me. The freakshow. The creature who looked like a ghost—something not ordinary. But I didn’t feel his distance, a sign he may have found and accepted it.
Julian turned his head and looked into my eyes as he ran the tip of his finger down the length of my palm. He laced his fingers with mine.
And we lay there on our backs, hands tied together, and returned our gaze to the starry midnight sky.
There was no longer a need to figure him out, to ask him questions.
Only to be around him. To be with him. To be real like this.
Julian Blackwell was cursed, and now, so was I.
Chapter 14
Julian
After what had happened during the Town Hall meeting and the death of Jury Smith, I knew it would only be a matter of time before I was called here to the Order’s Chambers.
This wasn’t the first time I had been invited. Yes, the Order had invited me by a formal invitation postmarked and hand-delivered to my mother’s house, complete with the Order’s seal stamped over the flap enclosure.
Thankfully, Ocean, the homeless man who’d slept behind Mina’s Diner, had been passed out and didn’t witness my attempt on the flatlander at the basketball courts when I’d blacked out. The girl I’d almost killed had been drunk, her story hardly credible. Officer Stoker had shown up at the auto shop for questioning. I’d told him she came on to all of us at Voodoos, and we turned her down. That I went straight home after I left the bar. A heap of half-truths, which only turned a monster into a coward.